Information available to Today indicates that Obuasi Municipal Assembly in the Ashanti region is broke.
That, Today understands, is due to the indiscretion on the part of the Municipal Chief Executive of the Assembly, Richard Ofori Agyeman Boadi.
Mr. Ofori Agyeman Boadi is alleged to have given the Assembly’s money to some people in the municipality as loans.
And the loanees, Today learnt, are not traceable, a situation which has resulted in stalling development projects in the area.
Minutes of the 2nd General Assembly of the sixth assembly of the municipality, which Today has chanced upon, catalogue a number of challenges the assembly is currently facing.
For instance, on item 6.4, headlined, “Finance and Administration,” the executive committee of the Assembly proposed that the names of debtors since they cannot be traced should be deleted from the Assembly’s records.
The Assembly consequently, in the said minutes, agreed to the proposal by the committee.
However, it suggested that the finance officer of the Assembly should retrieve the monies from those he would be able to identify and indicate as bad debts the ones that cannot be retrieved.
However, when Today contacted Mr. Ofori Agyeman Boadi, he described as “false,” the claim that the Assembly was bankrupt.
“We are doing lots of projects in the municipality, and these include street lightning and paying contractors. Does this mean the Assembly is broke?” the MCE asked.
The assembly, according to a pressure group, Progressive Movement for Change (PMC), came under intense pressure last month from its members to pay them their three-month allowance arrears of GHC150 for each member.
That worrying situation, Today learnt, compelled the Member of Parliament (MP) for Obuasi East, Hon. Edward Ennin, to intervene with a promise to use part of his Common Fund to pay the Assembly members.
Meanwhile, the MCE has equally denied receiving any money from the Obuasi East MP as loans to pay assembly members.
But the MP, earlier on a radio station in Obuasi, confirmed that he indeed helped them but has since been reimbursed.
However, Chairman of PMC, Nana Amoako, who spoke with Today, said “our MP has no such right to give out our money in the form of loans to the assembly which has members from both east and west without the consent of the people who voted him to Parliament.”
On the conduct of the MCE, Nana Amoako asked the whereabouts of the guarantors of the loanees since the recipients were nowhere to be found.
“We suspect the MCE might have given the money to his party folks and cronies as gifts but captured it as loans, so that he will later come to lie to us that the debtors cannot be traced. This must not be accepted as debt on the assembly. Someone must be held responsible and in this case, the MCE,” Nana Amoako insisted.
According to the group chairman, the MCE has shown lots of immaturity since his appointment.
For example, Nana Amoako could also not understand why the contractor who worked on the MCE’s bungalow was overpaid.
He claimed that the MCE captured in his 2015 composite budget of the assembly that the Obuasi Senior High School wall fencing and one other project had been completed, but it emerged at the Assembly’s last meeting that the contract was yet to be awarded.
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